De Profundus

I have spent my day thinking about loss. My Dad, Erica’s Mom (it’s her birthday today), love, friendships, jobs: all of the big ones that shuffled the pieces of my insides around enough that some of the pieces simply disappeared. I thought of Mom Jackson’s crazy laugh and about all of the people she loved most gathering at her resting place, adorning it with flowers, tears and the deepest love. I thought of my last exchange with her and then I thought of my Dad. My last I love you to him, whispered inside his bedroom door where he lay in dim light, his chest heaving, close to his earthly exit. I was vacuuming the floors, thoughtfully until I was sobbing uncontrollably.  I relayed it a bit to Erica in a text, how I have found this to be an incredibly hard year and was feeling that weight today just a little too heavily from thinking and feeling and longing for things I no longer have, people. It opened so many wounds and conjured my sorrows, ones I deserved, ones I didn’t, and ones I still to this day do not understand.  And then there’s death. Who can ever fully comprehend that kind of loss? It is one thing to lose someone to life’s circumstances and know that somewhere in the world they are still looking up at the same stars but to try and resolve that someone you love is looking down at you from them? Well, that is another can of worms entirely.

In that vein, and from sitting here staring the cover of the book cover Ruthie and Terri sent me to accompany my early birthday surprise, I wrote a wee poem:

De Profundus

I used to smother

under the burden

of barely breathing

in a weighted life

but one daring day

I reached down deep

into my chest where

my heart used to be

found a fist full of nerve

and told myself to exhale

&

out of the depths

I climbed

**

Time for a cup of tea, a few pages of my book until my evening errands commence.

However you spent your Sunday, I hope it soothed you somehow.

In propinquity,

Nic